Amina Alaoui: Arco Iris

Amazing, my last post dates from almost three weeks ago. I can scarcely believe it. Of course, we spent a week in the Easter holidays at my parents' place, where I barely listened to music. But still, the feeling of time speeding up as we go is something that strikes me more often these days. So, I'll try to give a roundup of my listening experiences over the last few weeks in a slightly more compact form than usual.

I'll start with the recording that I've been listening to most recently. Arco Iris is a recent ECM album by Amina Alaoui, the specialist in arab-andalusian music, whom I got to know via the Siwan project with Jon Balke. Over the last few years I have enjoyed ECM's contributions to the classical, jazz and crossover catalogue immensely. Lately, however, I've started to think that Eicher formula was starting to wear. ECM has always benefited from its niche status but now it's maybe getting too big and exposed for its own good. But then comes along an album such as Arco Iris where everything just fits and one is happy that the old magic hasn't disappeared.

It starts with the cover: a tantalising image of vast and elementary spaces, awash in a palette of bronze, gold and shimmering metal, that kindles a desire for the infinite (photo: Alejandro Torres). The album is almost exclusively devoted to Alaoui's own music, set to her own words or those from early or late medieval poets and mystics. She sings, as is her custom, in arabic, Spanish and Portuguese. Despite the mixture of literary sources, fado is the unifying thread that runs through the whole album. The ensemble that supports Alaoui is of much more modest scope than the full-fledged baroque orchestra plus various soloists on Siwan. Here we have Saïffallah Ben Abderrazak on violin, Sofiane Negra on oud, José Luis Monton on flamenco guitar, Eduardo Miranda on mandolin and Idriss Agnel on percussion. All these musicians are astonishingly accomplished and provide a masterful foil for Alaoui's tantalising voice. The music, produced by Eicher, has been recorded in the studio of the Swiss Radio and Television in Lugano. But the ECM team has created something very different from a typical studio ambiente for this album. The sound is fairly warm and reverberant without losing focus, however. We have the impression that we are listening to a performance in a small chapel, or in a cloister garden. There is this combined feeling of space and intimacy with fits the music just right. It's truly ravishing. The music itself then. There are 12 tracks totalling to more than an hour's music. Those familiar with Siwan will recognise Alaoui's style of florid and passionate extemporisation on arab-iberan themes. Her voice launches into amazing arabesques. In the booklet she writes:

The challenge of the fado singer is having the audacity that comes with freedom and savouring the risk of learning to walk on the moon, an extraordinary balancing act in which the old landmarks no longer suffice. I set foot on unknown ground. Teeter to the right and left. Body and voice suspended in atmosphere. I spin round and then slide, lose my way and try not to fall. Drawn in on the breath of strange, dizzying arabesque, which pulverises all symmetry and all sense of centre as it moves. It is a curve of abstract and relative truth, a sinuous improvised line, which spirits away the finite and flirts with the infinite. Pure equilibrium on this lunar field. Yet music as mysticism knows this modus vivendi. 

The mood is generally intimate and reflective, but there are long tracks (Flor de Nieve, Ya laylo layl, and particularly Las Morillas de Jaén) that are more lively and dramatic. The accompaniment is, as already said, stellar. The timbres of the different string instruments mingle in the most delicate fashion. Negra's oud sounds wonderfully mysterious. I'm particularly impressed by José Luis Monton's pyrotechnics (but always at the service of the music) on his flamenco guitar. It meshes beautifully with Miranda's mandolin. Idriss Agnel's percussion is most discreetly but effectively present. Abderrazak's violin breathes langourous and poetic lines.

As said: on this album everything just fits: the artwork, the recording, the liner notes, the music, the voice, the ensemble. My confidence in Eicher's project is fully restored.